Wednesday, May 25, 2005
BOSTON GLOBE COLUMNIST JAMES CARROLL
offers some negative views on the exclusivist belief of Catholicism:
Pope Benedict XVI would never countenance the physical denigration of the Koran or the harassment of Jews for being Christ-killers, but his warnings about the ''dictatorship of relativism," and his robust assertions of Vatican-centered Catholicism's exclusive possession of the fullness of truth are signs of changing weather.
The election as pope of such a figure has dark significance for the future of Catholic liberalism, but it may go far beyond the boundaries of the church, pointing to the arrival of a global cold front, the coming of a new climate of radical intolerance.
Is doubt part and parcel of rational inquiry, or not? Is ambiguity essential to human knowing, or not? If the ground on which one stands while thinking, and the time within which one pursues a thought to its conclusion are both in flux, as suggested by the insights of Albert Einstein, why is ''relativity" to be taken as wicked?...
Thinking of Christianity in particular, one must ask a hard question of those who reassert the triumphalist claims of the past: Do you not know the history of such absolutism? How theological denigration of others so often led to bloodshed? How, in particular, those labeled ''Christ-killers" were themselves killed? How the religion of Muslims was itself understood as a capital crime? How the very idea of democratic liberalism was forged in the crucible of religious wars, Christians slaughtering each other in good conscience for the sake of the ''one way" of Jesus Christ?
In the era of global warming, the link between human assumptions and climate is clear. The threat to the Earth of unintended climate change is a metaphor for the less tangible but equally grave threat arising from reasserted assumptions of religious superiority, polluting the human climate with intolerance, perhaps spawning winds of violence.
